Tuesday, 23 August 2016

In my experience it's a myth that all craft beer geeks reflexively dismiss traditional British family and regional breweries as producing "boring brown beer" that's not worth bothering with. What I'm more inclined to believe is that we have a typically geekish tendency to differentiate strongly and occasionally arbitrarily between between the breweries that, in our view, "exemplify a great brewing tradition" and the ones that "peddle mass-produced dishwater designed by accountants to a captive audience of tied houses."

Given this, and based on the fine beer blogging tradition of making general statements largely by extrapolating from your own opinions, I've assembled a non-comprehensive list of British family and regional brewers, ordered by how unsurprised I'd be to hear someone in the Craft Beer Co loudly telling anyone who'll listen that they actually make some really great traditional ales. As I said, this ranking is largely based on my own prejudices, and I'd be genuinely interested to hear any conflicting opinions - I might even try running a poll at some point to produce something a bit more authoritative.

With that out of the way, the rankings are as follows:

Harveys

Adnams

Fullers

Sam Smiths

Timothy Taylor

Theakstons

JW Lees

Hook Norton

Batemans

Brains

Shepherd Neame

Greene King

Robinsons

Thwaites

Marstons

Everards

Mc Mullens

Wells & Young

The "neo-nationals" on the list are assumed to include all of their subsidiaries and real ale sub-brands. Conversely, I've not tried to take account of how interested people might be in "craft" sub-brands - this is about how brewers are seen in their capacity as traditional brewers. St Austell would have ranked highly, but I've disqualified them for producing inadequately brown beer - their core range is practically a craft sub-brand in itself! Greene King are perhaps controversially high - this is based on the assumption that the rarity and interest of XX Mild and 6X outweight the ubiquity of IPA and Old Speckled Hen - whereas Harveys and Adnams seem like no-brainers for the top two - it's rare to hear a bad word spoken about either of them. And it's worth saying that even the lowest ranked of these aren't necessarily bad - I've happily drunk beer from almost all of them - just that I wouldn't expect them to inspire many beer geeks to actively seek out their pubs.

What do we learn from this? Well, I'm not a brand consultant, but if I was in a Hollywood bodyswap comedy where I'd woken up the body of one, and I had to bluff my way through a presentation aimed at reviving the fortunes of an ailing family brewer by helping them to connecting them with the younger, beer-geekier end of the market[1], here's what I'd say:

Brew distinctive, characterful beer. Obviously people can make a mint with nondescript but well marketed beer, but having a flagship product whose intrinsic properties make people want to tell their friends about it is a clear bonus.

Play to your strengths. Your strengths will probably be your history and regional identity, so see what you can do with those before trying to get all trendy. Be aware that everyone and his dog plays the history card, so you'll have to go the extra mile to be taken seriously on that front - it's not enough just to have old-fashioned pump clips or black-and-white pictures in your adverts, you'll need to have a quirky survivor of a style in your portfolio or start digging in the archive for historic recipes.

Be personal. Anyone can pay for advertising copy about how much they care about the quality of their beer, but if you have an opinionated head brewer who posts about it on Twitter then people might start to believe you.

A "craft" sub-brand isn't the answer in itself. If people think that your core range is designed by accountants, they'll probably assume that your "craft" range is as well.

[1] rather than following the potentially more lucrative strategy of connecting them with end of the market that isn't that interested in beer but can't be bothered with wine and knows that cider's for teenagers and yokels and lager's for football hooligans...